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Enough with the Pieces of Paper, Already!

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Over the weekend I was once again reduced to having to enter the month’s myriad charges into Quickbooks. Wonder-Accountant has suggested that instead of wadding receipts into a file folder and forgetting them, I should organize them and staple them to the relevant month’s statement, a strategy conducive to her reconciling the books.

For a person with English-major math skills, doing the bookkeeping is a monthly exercise in self-torment. I just hate fiddling with dozens and dozens of nuisancey little pieces of paper, no two of which have the date in the same place. The accursed Safeway receipts show you how much you supposedly “saved” by presenting your fraudulent red card, thereby getting them to refrain from charging more than the actual retail price for groceries and household goods. So you have to sit there and study the things to figure out which figure represents the amount that actually was charged to your card. The pieces of paper get lost, and so every month SOMETHING doesn’t show up in Quicken, so then you have to kill more time trying to figure out what the charge on the statement means.

This weekend I finally lost patience with that routine.

I’ve decided to go back to the antediluvian process of paying routine bills with checks. It costs more—you have to buy the damn checks. But it creates a paper trail (which cash does not), and you don’t have to fiddle with a thousand little pieces of paper to pay a monthly bill. The bill is paid when you make the buy.

My plan now is to use the charge card only for tax-related purchases that require me to have a receipt and for big-ticket items like appliances and major repair bills. All the rest of the little pieces of paper will go straight into the trash. The small, routine stuff will be strictly pay as you go. Since I’m pretty well behaved about entering my checks in the register, to put those expenses into Quickbooks all I’ll have to do is copy them out of the list in the register. The credit union has upgraded its online banking software so I can view my checks without having to switch from Firefox to Safari, and I can download them to disk with a simple right-click. When the statements come in, I’ll just copy every check to disk. Time Machine will back them up to a hard drive, and voila! A virtual paper trail.

And if that turns out to be too much of a nuisance? Then once or twice a month I’ll go to the credit union and withdraw $500 or $1,000 in cash to use for discretionary spending. Rather not: cash does flow through my fingers like water. But  I have had it with the little pieces of paper.

Regressive? Probably. We’ll see if it makes life better.

Is there any modern convenience in your life that you’ve decided to abandon in favor of regressing to an older way of doing things? Why?

Moment of Fame

The Festival of Frugality appears at This That and the MBA, where the overpackaging rant was included.

Workman Waltz: Blue Danube Dance

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Bila the Bosnian Painter dropped by this fine Sunday morning. He was as entertained by the story of the clueless painters as he was by the new-to-him Corgi (Anna the Ger-Shep owned this place the last time he was here). He proposes to do the job for $400 to $500, as opposed to the $800 Jeff the Painting Entrepreneur wanted for his hapless campesinos. That includes the garage, for which Jeff the P.E. belatedly decided he wanted another $250.

So, that makes the day feel a great deal brighter. And isn’t it appropriate for the Workman Waltz dance card: the Danube flows right through Croatia and Serbia!

The residents of which nations, we might add, are responsible for the presence in our country of many excellent artisans and craftsmen (those who survived the genocide). Bila saw action in that war and eventually fled to Western Europe. Over time he made his way to North America and the United States. Eastern Europe’s loss, our gain.

Weekend Roundup

For aspiring and arrived writers of various sorts, here’s an entertaining read on “how to write.”

This article debunking a widely beloved Limbaugh-style myth has been online for several days at The Atlantic. That  makes it “old,” I suppose, but apparently it’s attracting plenty of traffic. As usual, the comments are as interesting (or more so) than the post.

Lately I’ve developed a craving to seek out new-to-me PF blogs, since those sites are now strewn like ribbons in gay profusion across the Internet. Here’s a guy (I assume) who dabbles in oil securities, writing at Beat the Index. He does the numbers for electric cars and concludes, not unsurprisingly, that they don’t yet make great financial sense for most consumers.

Bible Money Matters is not new to me, but I haven’t visited in way too long. Peter, I see, hasn’t lost his touch. Check out this entertainingly written and good advice on what he calls “zombie” accounts.

At My Family Finances, John posts an interesting rumination on the sociological impacts of college degrees, complete with some eye-opening comparisons and graphs.

Ever have that “uh-oh…” feeling? Jefferson at See Debt Run had a pip…in the middle of the night!

The Outlier Model’s proprietor CF urges us not to donate to charities. Drop over there and find out why.

At another site that’s not new to me but not visited enough, Joe Plemon and his son Jonathon put their second fix-and-flip on the market. Looks like they’ll do pretty well on this one, having learned a lot from their first experience.

Edward Antrobus, much like M’hijito, appears to be stuck in a job any halfway competent high-school graduate could do, making his expensive college degree look rather pointless. Offered a promotion, he agonizes.

Evolving Personal Finance reflects on the tendency for found money to create new “wants.”

Frugal Portland reports that she never uses cash. It’ll be interesting to see what changes we’ll make if merchants actually do start charging extra for credit-card purchases.

Here’s something rather amazing at Earth and Money: check out the response EaM got to a post written somewhat earlier about a type of packaging that looks pretty unecological.

Lately I’ve noticed Add Vodka, another one of those great Canadian blogs—check out proprietor Daisy’s post on the startling cost of owning a car for those on the north side of the border!

And Wealth Artisan is another site that only recently came to my attention. Here’s a tongue-in-cheek bit of advice for budding entrepreneurs.

Everyday Tips and Thoughts presses one of my buttons: sales morons who little-woman the female customer.

And in the old friends department, I see Frugal Scholar is back from a long summer’s hiatus. And by golly, Blogger is letting me comment there again…hallelujah, brothers & sisters! Check out the interesting idea for an olive oil scrub. I love that idea. Matter of fact, I think I’m going to go try it right now.

Images:

Confluence of the Sava and the Danube in Belgrade. Igor Jeremić. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

The Iron Gate on the Danube, on the Serbian-Romanian border. Denis Barthel. GNU Free Documentation License.

When the Workman Waltz Turns into the Workman Stumble…

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{moan} I should’ve called Bila the Bosnian Painter, the guy who can fly through an entire house in one day. Possibly I was overdemanding to be unhappy that he destroyed the Saltillo tile in M’hijito’s bathroom by using yellow masking tape on it to hold down his drop cloths. The tile now needs to be professionally stripped and refinished, and we don’t know if that will fix the strips of mastic that soaked into the porous tile and now are permanently embossed in it. But at least Bila is competent, overall.

Because I was unhappy about the tiles—and, let’s face it, because Bila can be kinda careless in general—I tracked down another painter. The guy who installed the doors and window recommended someone he knew, saying this fellow had painted his house, did a decent job, and was neither the cheapest nor the highest in the cost department. So Jeff the Painting Entrepreneur came over to issue a bid.

The plan was to repaint the dog-ravaged walls in the hallway, one of which extends into the dining room; change the color in my office, repaint the closet-sized master bathroom the same color only in flat paint; repair a ding on the front door and repaint that; paint the interior doors and some of the baseboards; fill joints around the new framing for one of the new doors; touch up paint around the doors and window; and paint the inside of the garage (most of the walls are covered with cabinetry, and so this is not a tall order). They also were supposed to repair a bad crack over the door between the kitchen and the garage—the old, deteriorated tape a previous owner applied needed to be removed, the crack cleaned out, new spackling packed into it, new tape applied, and the drywall around the patch retextured. Cost was supposed to be $800.

Background: the bid Jeff the P.E. gave me had two sections: one for just these few things ($800) and one to paint the entire house ($2200). In person, he had said the first part of his bid included the garage, but in his penciled bid he’d left the garage out of the $800 offer. When I noticed this I called him on the phone and asked whether the garage was included in the $800 bid, as he’d said it was when he was here, and he said yes, it was—he’d just forgotten to include it.

They were supposed to show up on Wednesday to start painting. Along about 9:00 two men show up at the door. Neither of them speaks English. One guy can sort of make himself understood in pigeon English; the other appears not to be able to speak the language at all.

Fortunately, all I want to do is repaint with existing colors. And when the house was painted the last time, I painted each color on a piece of art paper; on the back of each piece of paper, I wrote down the formula on the can. So I handed the English-speaking dude—let’s call him Angelo—these samples to take to Dunn Edwards, where they proposed to buy the paint.

The color that goes up the hallway and into the dining room, which is a kind of sunny terra cotta, is actually a Behr paint. My friend VickyC’s shirt-tail relative, Kenny the Unlicensed Painter, applied that paint; he preferred to work with Home Depot, which he felt was cheaper, and besides, Consumer Reports rated Behr much higher than Dunn Edwards paints. Kenny annoyed me because he brought his wife and made her do all the work while he sat on the sofa and yakked; and also because his life is one long saga of intractable problems, all of which he imagines I can solve. The last thing I wanted to do was get into that again!

So. Terra cotta. We could call it a variety of orange. Behr, not Dunn Edwards.

The two campesinos say they’re taking these several colors (the terra cotta, a kind of linen-colored off-white, a pearl gray, and the dust gray-brown I’d like to use on the garage walls) to Dunn Edwards, and since it will take quite a while for D-E to match them, they’ll be back the next morning.

So. Paint job does not start on Wednesday, as advertised.

They say they’ll show up by 7:30 on Thursday. They actually appear about quarter to 9, causing me to miss the weekly SBA meeting, after which I was supposed to go by a client’s office and drop off a finished job. They have a woman in tow; she appears to be a girlfriend or wife along for the ride.

First crack out of the box, Angelo tells me the boss, Jeff, told them they were not to paint the garage—that the garage was not in the bid. I say he’d told me it was. He says Jeff wants another $250 for the job. I say I won’t pay that and so they should forget that part of the job.

My color pattern is kind of complex. Each room has an accent wall; in the office, I wanted three walls painted off-white and the fourth painted pearl gray; the closet bifold doors were to be left alone. So these guys could figure out which walls were to be painted which color, I taped a yellow sticky on each wall:

white
white
white
gray

Does that look hard to understand?

Angelo goes in the office, closes the door, throws open the window to the 100-degree heat as the air-conditioning is pounding away, and starts painting. Eventually he resurfaces, feeling proud of himself for having painted three of the four walls. I look in there: he’s painted them the wrong color!

I should have realized: if the guy can barely speak English, of course he can’t read English. Duh!

But I did tell him. We walked all through the house and I showed him, waving the painted sheets of paper around, which walls were to be painted which colors.

He agrees to repaint the walls the right color.

Now I e-mail the client to ask if I can return her project when I’m back in Scottsdale next week. She says no, she needs the job back today. So, I get in my car and drive to Scottsdale, about an hour-long round trip. While I’m out, the Three Stooges start painting the hallway/dining room walls.

When I get home, I notice the paint doesn’t seem to be quite the right color. The paint can says it’s the color ordered, but instead of the vibrant terra cotta that was suppose to be applied, the paint is a muddy reddish brown. First I think well, latex paints dry a different color from the way they look when freshly applied, but after awhile I realize the color is just wrong. None of these three folks can speak English well enough for me to discuss this with them.

I also realize they haven’t repaired the crack as advertised. It appears they’ve slathered a thick layer of spackling over the mess and then slopped paint over the WET spackling compound!

But I don’t have time to think very hard about this, because as I walk in the door I realize these clowns haven’t removed the switchplates and outlet covers. Those switchplates are hand-made. I bought them in San Francisco from a shop that retails the work of artisans and craftsmen, and they were very expensive. The Three Stooges were rolling rectangles around them preparatory to cutting in around them with a paintbrush.

I’ve worked with enough painters over the years to know that even guys who are in a ball-busting hurry will remove the switch plates, because it’s faster to take two seconds to unscrew a quarter-inch-long bolt than to cut in around every switch and outlet in the house. So I had to run ahead of them and remove all the hand-made switchplates plus the others that I had hand-painted to go with them.

Enough!! I try to reach Jeff by phone—only to learn he’s out of the country! His answering machine gives an e-mail address through which he can supposedly be reached while he’s junketing around.

Along about 2:00 p.m., the motley crew leaves. In five hours, they’ve painted the tiny bathroom (which I could have done myself in about 30 or 40  minutes, max), painted the office twice (having screwed up the first time), made a mess of the drywall repair job, and painted the hall/dining room walls muddy brown.

As soon as they walk out the door, I take my paint sample and the can of paint they’d used down to Dunn Edwards and ask why the colors were so different. Josh, the sales rep, says “that was because they didn’t want to wait.” I say the day before they’d taken the specs for the paint and the sheet of paper that I had covered with the correct paint yesterday so they could leave their order overnight, so they wouldn’t have to stand around forever. He says, “No, they didn’t,” and points out that the cans are dated Thursday, July 26. If they’d ordered the paint on Wednesday, they would be dated July 25. I write down Jeff’s explanation of what happened at the Bell Road Dunn Edwards, as he interpreted the details from the paint can’s label:

“They did a read and shoot. It takes at least an hour, and sometimes longer. People do that when they don’t want to wait while an exact match is made. If they asked for a match, Dunn Edwards would shoot the color and then adjust it several times, letting it dry to check the color, until they got it correct. This takes quite a long time.”

So, what happened here is our guys told me they were getting the paint matched, and they did not. The reason they were over an hour late on Thursday morning was because they didn’t bother to place an order for the paint on Wednesday, which would have given Dunn Edwards time to match the color properly. By the way, Josh also told me that they had bought the lowest, cheapest grade of paint possible.

I asked Angelo to remove the defunct burglar alarm sensors in the dining and family rooms. He did not. I asked several times. After the muddy brown paint was applied to the wall, he removed one; he broke apart the other one but failed to take a screwdriver and remove the backplate from the wall.

Finally, instead of using the alley or the utility sink in the garage (which Angelo saw while I was showing him where to paint and what colors), the Stooges washed unused paint out of their buckets onto the desert landscaping in the front yard. When I stopped them and told them not to do that to my (expensive!) landscaping and (unbelievably expensive!) specimen tree, they said “It’s only water.” I pointed out that water is not white; water is clear. Paint contains toxins that harm desert trees when the stuff soaks through to their roots. If that mature tree is damaged or killed because of this irresponsible treatment, I am taking Jeff the Painting Entrepreneur to small claims court for the cost of removing and replacing it.

These clowns, who surely must have been day laborers Jeff picked up out of a Home Depot parking lot, didn’t even have drop cloths. They left my furniture in disarray; they pulled the wires out of a stereo speaker that now will have to be repaired; the crack over the door will have to be undone and fixed by someone who knows what he’s doing; the mess left where they half-way removed the burglar alarm sensors remains to be fixed.They got paint all over my desk, only some of which I was able to scrub off.

I was, however, able to get the paint off the dog. Probably because she’s still shedding and the painted fur fell out when I scrubbed her.

Jeff the P.E. having left his e-mail address in his answering machine message, I e-mailed him to explain the situation and tell him to call his goons off:

I want you to tell these gentlemen not to come back here. If you have a competent craftsman in your employ, you might consider sending him around to finish the work, but I do not want a couple of laborers who clearly are not professionals in my house.

While I was at Dunn Edwards, I asked a licensed painter how much it costs to hire a non-English-speaking laborer to do a slapdash paint job. He estimated about $10 per hour. I also asked Josh how much a gallon of Dunn Edwards’s cheapest would cost at a contractor’s discount and was told it would be no more than $20. So, I will pay you as follows:

The two men who showed up did most of the work. The woman spent most of her time standing around. They arrived after 8:30 and they left a little after 2:00 p.m. So I will pay you for two workers’ labor for 5 1/2 hours, at $10 per hour per worker. That comes to $110.

They purchased 8 gallons of paint. Two gallons are the wrong color, and they are the wrong color because the men did not leave them at Dunn Edwards yesterday, as they said they had done. I will have to buy more paint and either paint the wall myself or hire someone else to paint it. Therefore I am not paying for the two gallons of the wrong color. They also purchased two gallons of the adobe beige color I asked you to paint the garage. I am not paying for paint that will not be applied because of a last-minute decision that contradicts our oral agreement. So, I will pay you for four gallons of paint at $20/gallon. That comes to $80.

Total, then, would be $190.

One would expect this would get his attention. Apparently not, though: I haven’t heard back.

When his guys show up this morning, I’m going to send them away. I don’t want the clowns in my house again—they’ve already made quite enough mess, thank you.

Bila the Bosnian Painter is coming over on Saturday to give me an estimate for repairing and repainting the front door, repainting the hall and maybe the garage, and painting the interior doors and trim. While he’s here I’ll ask him if he’ll paint the accent wall in the office “gray lace,” a deeper color than the pearl gray Angelo applied, which will suffice but is pretty bland.

Needless to say, this chaos has done nothing good for my work life. In addition to the missed meeting and the rush trip to deliver the completed project, we’re right on deadline for the large project we’ve been working on. We’re almost finished, but I’ve still got to go over each of the gerjillion files the client has returned for final clean-up and checking.

I struggled to do that while the clowns were roiling around yesterday, without much luck. Got through half-dozen files. Effing Word corrupted the one file that needed a fair amount of work, losing it permanently. I’d e-mailed it to the client for final approval, but the file in the “sent” box also was corrupted. She doesn’t seem even to have received it: I asked her to send it back to me if she could open it, and what she returned was an earlier file. So now I have to do all that work over again.

In a word…fuck!

Success! I managed to make myself sick!

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What skill! Few people can will themselves another step closer to the grave. I’m so good at it, I amaze me.

Spent the better part of the day before yesterday laying around the Mayo’s ER. I’d been resisting seeing a doctor for quite some time, having convinced myself that the chest pains that recently have visited were heartburn. These have been coming on about 11:00 p.m. or midnight, when I usually go to bed. But Tuesday after I’d made myself a magnificent midday meal—grilled coho salmon; corn on the cob; salad of shredded broccoli, avocado, and tomato; wine in a bottomless glass; two dishes of staggeringly delicious ice cream—the stabbing pain under the sternum would not go away. And boy, did that hurt!

So, since the 911 people will not take one to the Mayo from this part of town but instead will insist on delivering one to St. Joseph’s, where a) I almost died a few years ago, of neglect and b) the Church’s idea of medical care for women does not accord with mine, it was into the car for a quick schlep to the ER of one of the few hospitals around here that consistently ranks high in clinical care and patient safety.

Seven hours later…

They decided I wasn’t having a heart attack, thank God. Other than slightly (and not surprisingly) elevated blood pressure, apparently I have no cardiac issues.

No. The doc thought it was GERDS that probably has developed into an ulcer. Once they’ve decided there’s no emergency, they let me cool my heels interminably. Fortunately I’d brought an ARC from Poisoned Pen Press to edit. Managed to finish the entire book before I got out of there, bearing a prescription for omeprazole—the very same overpackaged horsepills I was complaining about the other day—and another for something called sucralfate. Omeprazole is Prilosec. I say to the guy, “I’ve already got this stuff at home, and in fact I’ve been taking it for the past two days” (what part of my chart did you not read?). He says no, don’t take that; this prescription is stronger.

Wise by now to the fact that neither Medicare nor my Medigap policy will cover a penny of a prescription filled in the Mayo pharmacy, I schlep to the Walgreen’s on the way to my house. Thought it was a 24-hour pharmacy, but no. Get there 15 minutes before they close.

Also wise to the fact that Medigap carriers will try to avoid paying for any prescription drug, no matter what, I ask the pharmacist if the things can be had over the counter.

She says the sucralfate is prescription-only (mercifully, it only costs $11—the alleged insurance covered $8 of the retail price), but, she says, “I don’t understand why he wrote a scrip for this omeprazole. It’s identical to the over-the-counter version.”

I say, “He said it’s stronger.”

“No, it’s  not,” she says. “It’s exactly the same: 20 grams”

“Hmm. So if I get home and discover the omeprazole I’ve already got is 10 grams, it’s OK for me to take two of them?”

“Sure.”

I finally reach home a little after 9:00 p.m. M’hijito has come over after work and fed the dog, and while he was here he discovered that I’d left a pan of chicken in the propane grill, which I was cooking up for Cassie. It was cremated, of course, and the grill was still merrily trying to reduce it to ashes.

Hilariously, he decided the result, toast-brown chicken chitlin’s, was edible enough for a dog, and so he retrieved the pieces, piled them on a plate, and stashed them in the fridge. He doesn’t realize, of course, that this is not a dog but a goddess visiting earth in furry disguise: hence the sobriquet “The Queen of the Universe.”

To rescue the pan, he filled it with soapy water and left it on the stove.

Well, the stink defied belief: cremated chicken is not something you want to invite into the house. 😀

The pan was brim-full of grease & water, which I couldn’t pour down the sink. Nor did I think I could carry it out to the alley to dump it without splashing it all over myself, the floor, and the flagstone patio.

Fortunately, I’d recently put the last of a bottle of distilled steam-iron water on a plant that’s sensitive to Phoenix’s gawdawful tap water, so dragged the empty gallon bottle out. It held most of the soapy greasy water so I could carry that and the rest of what remained in the pan to the garbage. What a mess!

Also fortunately, because I’d left the grill on “low,” the chicken and grease did not ignite and burn down the house…

I totally forgot. Forgot until I reached Walgreen’s and saw the text message from M’hijito on the new phone, and had he not come over and rescued the stuff, I probably would have gone straight to bed the minute I walked in the house and not remembered until the next morning. Or until the house burned down around my ears.

Speaking of forgetting, I forgot this morning’s SBA meeting. Told the painters I’d be here. Although…they did say they’d show up around 6:30, which would have given me time to get out the door to make the shindig. This pair works on mañana time. It’s 7:08 now. So presumably I’m not going to make it to Scottsdale by 7:15. Or at all.

So, anyway, back to the issue at hand: what ails me.

Booze, primarily. I have got to stop drinking.

And fat. About 15 pounds of overweight.

And indolence. Especially in this heat, the only exercise I get is wrestling with the pool equipment and the vacuum cleaner.

I don’t think I drink excessively, but I do have wine, beer, or whiskey every day. That’s because I happen to like a drink with dinner. And because I hurt myself: gave myself a fine fit of tendonitis that stretches from the hip all the way down into the heel, and it does hurt. What with the lovely new allergies to aspirin, acetaminophen, and ibuprofen, I can’t take anything for it…except booze. A glass of wine or a shot of whiskey works every bit as well as an aspirin, and it sure as hell tastes better.

Lately I’ve taken to fixing my large meal in the middle of the day, around 2 or 3 p.m. That’s when I get hungry, and besides, it’s less hassle and I have more energy then than late at night for cleaning up the mess. So this means I have a glass of wine around mid-afternoon. And then, usually, another glass of wine, because of course one glass doesn’t last until the food is cleared off the plate. Sometimes I might even have another half-glass, just to come out even.

This is probably not good.

Now that I’m stuffed, I don’t get hungry again until 9 or 10 at night. At that point, I’m likely to have a snack. And what am I going to wash it down with?

Yup. Whiskey & water.

Often I can’t finish a whole glass of branch water, especially at night when I’m running out of steam. However, the fact remains that I’m drinking some of it.

So, I’m officially off the sauce. Damn it.

As for exercise: That one escapes me. I can get a little exercise in the pool, but it’s not really big enough for laps and besides, my brain goes absolutely numb swimming back and forth and forth and back and back and forth and…. Plus I can’t stay out in the sun any length of time, because of all the interesting skin lesions a person who has spent her entire life in the subtropics develops. It is just. too. freaking. HOT to walk or run. Even after dark. The other day it was still 100 degrees at 10 p.m.

I hate, loathe, and detest gyms and even if I didn’t, I can’t afford memberships.

When fall semester starts, I’ll have a 7:30 a.m. class that will let out about 8:45. My plan is to toss a pair of hiking boots in the car and drive straight to one of the trailheads in the North Mountain park. Plenty of hills to walk up and down there, which is about the best way to get exercised in these parts. And when the weather cools enough that Cassie’s feet won’t burn on the pavement, she and I will be able to get back to our customary 45-minute daily constitutional.

And the fat? One of the approaches to GERDS is to eat a lot less food. Eat less, but eat more often. That would help. And since wine and whiskey load a fair number of empty calories onto your eating habit, I expect knocking off the booze will make some difference.

I’m not going back on Atkins. It may or may not be good for your health, but for a person who lives for pasta it’s not very sustainable.

And speaking of eating, the boys are still not here. I guess it’s time to conjure them up by trying to sit down to breakfast.

😉

 

Overpackaged! How much is this debris costing us??

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I’m sitting here with a bottle of Costco mouthwash on the desk. Broke a fingernail (again!) trying to get it open. The lid is sealed down with a fat strip of melted-on plastic, the name “Kirkland” stamped on it not once, not twice, but thirty times. Now I have to get up and haul this thing into the kitchen and dig out a knife to cut the damn plastic seal off.

In the kitchen, a box of anti-acid pills resides on the countertop. Need to take one of those this morning. To get at it, I have to dig a flat piece of cardboard out of a box, wherein a half-dozen horsepills are sealed between layers of plastic. Somehow I’m supposed to push a single pill through one of these plastic layers. This being a little on the difficult side (often, as in the case with allergy  pills, downright impossible), I’ll have to walk back into the office, dig a pair of scissors out of the desk drawer, carry them back to the kitchen, and cut open the damn plastic-&-cardboard packaging. While I’m at it, I’ll probably cut all of the pills out (it’s a 14-day supply), then walk back down the hall to the linen closet, scrounge out an empty bottle that does NOT have a goddamn adult-proof cap on it, carry it back to the kitchen, fill it with the pills, and throw out the box and the layers of pill “bubbles.”

The box of horsepills came inside a larger box dispensed by Costco, which sells such things in lifetime supplies. To get at the three boxes I bought a year or so ago, I had to open a larger box, which was wrapped in plastic. So to get to ONE pill I’ve had to hack my way through one, two, three, FOUR layers of packaging. All of which made their way to the landfill, where as we speak they’re presumably blowing around in the wind or strangling small varmints.

While I’m in the kitchen, I’ll grab the bottle of topical anti-hot spot drops the vet gave me so I can apply it to the dog’s well-chewed leg. The plastic dropper bottle is encased inside a plastic prescription bottle, soon to join its friends in the landfill. Or not: that one doesn’t have a person-proof lid on it, so I may save it to hold pills gouged out of plastic-&-cardboard bubbles.

What, for the love of God, is the POINT?

Do you know how much all this trash is costing us? In dollars, that is, rather than in pure unalloyed annoyance?

People in the business will tell you that wrapping, rewrapping, and overwrapping every damn thing that gets dropped into a consumer’s  hands can run anywhere from 1% to 75% of the cost of the goods. And that doesn’t count the cost of designing the labels, and it most certainly does not count the cost of hauling the trash to the dump and storing it there. Nor, presumably, does it include the cost of the Bandaids needed to cover the knife, scissor, and sharp-plastic wounds incurred when customers try to hack free the goods they purchased.

Consider just the costs the packaging guys ’fess up to:

• Plastic packaging for personal products: between 20% and 35% of the consumer’s cost for the goods.
• Pharmaceuticals: around 15%
• Beverages: 14% to 20% of consumer cost for goods
• Nestle and P&G food and household products: 5% to 10% of revenue
• Liquor: as much as 40% to 45% of consumer cost

Why are we doing this? Not because consumers so love having to hack through layers of plastic and cardboard to get at what they bought.

Way back in 2003, Piper Jaffray reported,

The global packaging industry is approximately a $433 billion market. The domestic packaging market, which is the major focus of this report, represents approximately 29%, or $124 billion of the global market…. The largest segments of the industry are paper and board and plastics, which account for 36% and 35%, respectively, of the global packaging market…. While packaging companies serve a variety of markets, the largest end markets for packaging products are food and beverage.  Food packaging accounts for approximately 40% ($175 billion) of all packaging applications.  Beverages represent approximately 18% or $80 billion.  These end markets are stable, non-cyclical, steadily growing markets that are consequently attractive, regardless of the economic climate.

Lovely. We cut our fingers, fume with frustration, fill our landfills with billions of pounds of unnecessary trash, have our taxes raised to maintain those landfills and run garbage trucks, and pay, on average, an extra 20% to 35% for food and necessaries so someone else can get filthy rich.

Apologists for this industry will tell you that individually plastic-wrapping cucumbers and packaging apples in clamshells are necessary to keep them from being damaged in shipping, and besides, you, the consumer, just love that packaging and won’t buy stuff without it.

Why do I think not? Why, indeed: I’ve been on this earth for rather more years than most, and during all that time produce and goods have been shipped, trained, trucked, and flown to market. [OHHH FOR GODSAKE! THIS DAMN MOUTHWASH BOTTLE HAS GOT A FLICKING CHILD-PROOF CAP ON IT! I CAN’T GET IT OPEN!!!!!!!]

Where were we? Yes. For most of those years, apples came in bins, not in consumer-proof clamshells. Pills came in bottles. Soda pop came in cans that you prized open with a churchkey. The same tool worked nicely to flip open a bottle of beer.

Actually, soda pop used to come as syrup. You added your own soda water to it, allowing you to decide on how strong or weak it would be.

No one ever heard of the pointless practice of sealing every single anti-acid and antibiotic and allergy pill individually inside sheets of plastic. Face cream and foundation came in bottles that let you access every last drop, not squirt containers that you can’t open and that don’t dispense all the product you paid for. Mouthwash came in jars whose lids you did not have to leave off (if you could ever get them off) when you put the jar back in the cupboard, so you could get at the product next time you wanted some of it.

The absence of unnecessary packaging didn’t seem to harm sales. People will buy what they need regardless of how it’s packaged or not packaged.

Some indications suggest that some consumers prefer not to buy overpackaged products. I certainly do, but not to such a degree that I won’t buy a product. Nor will I go out of my way to Sprouts or Whole Foods to find bulk products—even though in theory that’s one way to fight overpackaging. Burn more gas to buy less cardboard and plastic…

Here are some other strategies:

• Buy larger amounts in single containers. At Costco, for example, a lifetime supply of liquid laundry detergent comes in one plastic bottle, which appears to be made of less plastic than it would take to fabricate three bottles and lids.

• At the grocery store, select and purchase individual pieces of vegetables and fruits, rather than plastic bags full of onions, lemons, oranges, and the like.

• Buy a head of lettuce instead of a plastic box full of precut and prewashed lettuce (which you ought to wash anyway, to be safe…).

• Complain. Every Costco has a “suggestions” box. Whenever a product you want is overpackaged or challenging to break into, scribble a note on the way out, letting the management you object to that. Do the same at every retailer that foists over-packaged and consumer-proof products on you.

• Make them crazy. Whenever you encounter a package that requires a box cutter to open it, ask the cashier or customer service to open it. If they refuse to do it, tell them you can’t buy it because you can’t get it open. Amazingly, some stores actually arm their cashiers with box cutters, because quite a few customers report they can’t easily break into the consumer-proof packaging. If enough people demand extra help in opening clamshells and impenetrable plastic, retailers will send the word back to manufacturers.

• Before you leave the store, ask for help in opening child-proof and protect-you-from-yourself lids.

• Whenever possible, buy products sold in manageable packages instead of competing products that are overpackaged or consumer-proofed.

• Avoid products that are packaged in packets inside packages, such as certain snacks and over-the-counter drugs. Buy a bottle of loose generic allergy pills instead a packet of blister-packed brand-name pills—you’ll not only avoid hassle and vote with your dollars against overpackaging, you’ll save some money on the product.

• Urge local and national elected representatives to support legislation to limit overpackaging. (Good luck to that! The deep-pocketed packaging industry has a huge lobbying effort under way to put the kaibosh on any such schemes.)

• Shop with retailers that make some effort to limit overpackaging, such as Amazon and Walmart.

• Recycle. If you’re not already recycling, start now.

Resistance may be futile, but that’s no reason not to resist anyway.

Images:

Kirkland Mouthwash: Shamelessly ripped off from Amazon.com.
Blister-packaged pills: Alex Khimich, Blister with Pills, public domain.
Overpackaged lettuce: Christian Gahle, nova-Institut GmbH, Verpackungsblister aus Biokunststoff (Celluloseacetat), Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

Ridiculous Retirement System: With a Vengeance

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Various of our PF blogging friends have noted the dangerously low savings rates among middle- and working-class Americans, mostly by way of urging readers to set aside larger amounts in their 401(k) and other retirement accounts. Get Rich Slowly has suggested that a million dollars is not enough to support you in your retirement (in 20 years it’ll be worth all of $449,400 in today’s dollars) and that you should be investing between 4.2 and 5.7 percent of your income, depending on your age.

That is extremely low. I put 7% of my pay, matched by the Great Desert University for a total of 14%, into deferred savings, and I started that job with $250,000 in an IRA and another $80,000 in nondeferred brokerage accounts. I started that job 20 years ago. Today, laid off my job and essentially unemployable at age 67, I have just over half a million bucks. And that is nowhere near enough to live on through one’s dotage.

Economics professor Teresa Ghilarducci points out the fundamental problem: expecting everyone to set aside enough in self-directed, commercially operated savings funds to fund 20 or 30 years of unemployment (which is what “retirement” really is) has proven to be a massive failure. So much so that she brands it “ridiculous.” Our present 401(k)/403(b) retirement system, she observes, “simply defies human behavior. Basing a system on people’s voluntarily saving for 40 years and evaluating the relevant information for sound investment choices is like asking the family pet to dance on two legs…. This do-it-yourself pension system has failed. It has failed because it expects individuals without investment expertise to reap the same results as professional investors and money managers. What results would you expect if you were asked to pull your own teeth or do your own electrical wiring?”

The chickens, my friends, are flying home to roost as we speak. Most older workers cannot hold their jobs until they’re 70 (or older). The cold fact is, people over 50 have faster-growing rates of unemployment than any other group. And once you’re over about 45 in our youth-obsessed culture, you are going to have a very difficult time getting another job. If you’re 60 and older, forget it. The likelihood that you’ll land another job is almost nil, and if you do, it will be at an enormous cut in pay.

As Ghilarducci points out, “Almost half of middle-class workers, 49 percent, will be poor or near poor in retirement, living on a food budget of about $5 a day.”

Over at Wealth Pilgrim, Neal Frankl explains, with crystal clarity, why you will need about 20 times your present earnings to maintain your present lifestyle. It means that if you have an income of $50,000 today, your nest egg will have to amount to $1 million to support a middle-class lifestyle through the likely end of your life. That, my friends, is with a 5% average return on investment, which you may or may not achieve. “May not” is probably the operative term for funds managed by the do-it-yourselfer.

Using Neal’s rule of thumb—which adds up to the same ratio Ghilarducci cites, 20 times your present income(!)—to have a reasonable chance of maintaining a rather ordinary lifestyle through my dotage, I would have needed $1.2 million in investments when I was laid off at the virtually unemployable age of 64. That’s more than twice what I actually do have.

Neal’s calculation is a little more forgiving, because he asks you to figure what you will need to draw down from investments, which allows you to take into account details like Social Security, the amount of your revolving debt, whether your home is paid off, and whether you live in a high- or low-cost-of-living state. Simply divide the amount you will need by 5%, the projected rate of return on investments.

In my case, I need a bare minimum of $25,000 (a figure that grows with every tax increase, every utility increase, every auto and homeowner’s insurance increase, and every jump in food and gasoline prices). In theory, then, my half-million-dollar nest egg will support me. Just barely. Assuming Social Security continues for the rest of my life, something that is decidedly not a given.

The truth is, I really need more like $30,000 to $40,000 from investments, since that $25,000 allows for a lifestyle that we might call “pinched.” If I want to go out to eat more than once a month, might like to travel a bit, wish to wear clothes that don’t come from thrift stores, then I would need $600,000 to $800,000 in savings. And those savings would need to be intelligently invested.

Understand, $40,000 plus Social Security comes nowhere near what I was earning when my job came to an end. So under the best retirement scenario, which is impossible because I have nothing like enough to establish that scenario, I’m looking at a significantly diminished lifestyle. One, we might add, that will continue to shrink over time.

As Ghilarducci points out, a retirement “system” that is going to leave 75 percent of Americans in poverty when they hit old age is ridiculous: “failure is baked into the voluntary, self-directed, commercially run retirement plans system.” She suggests mandated, guaranteed retirement accounts, to be professionally managed and to pay out in annuities, on top of Social Security.

It’s a little late for those of us who have already been involuntarily retired or who are still working but don’t have a chance of setting aside 30% or more of gross income. But for the younger generations: something needs to be done, and soon. The coming “retirement crisis” is going to affect everyone. As I’ve pointed out myself, when Baby Boomers sink into poverty, their adult sons and daughters will be called upon to support them.

What we have here is a retirement system that’s ridiculous not only for the vast number of workers who are edging toward old age, but for everyone else, too.